Peter Head
Peter Head is Founder and Chair of Ecological Sequestration Trust (The Trust).
Peter is a champion of sustainable development. He established the Ecological Sequestration Trust in 2011. He advocates that changing the way we invest public and private money in the built environment could be made very much more effective if the public and private sectors adopt sustainable development principles.
Peter is a civil and structural engineer who has become a recognised world leader in major bridges (he received an OBE for successfully delivering the Second Severn Crossing as Government Agent), advanced composite technology and now in sustainable development in cities and regions. He has won many awards for his work including the Award of Merit of IABSE, the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Silver Medal and the Prince Philip Award for Polymers in the Service of Mankind.
He joined Arup in 2004 to create and lead their planning and integrated urbanism team which by 2011 had doubled in size. He directed work on the Dongtan Eco City Planning project which was voted by Chinese developers in 2005 as the most influential development project in China.
In July 2008 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in engineering at Bristol University, where he is a visiting Professor in Sustainable Systems Engineering.
In May 2011 he was appointed as a visiting professor in eco-cities at Westminster University. In 2009 he was awarded the Sir Frank Whittle medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering for a lifetime contribution to the well-being of the nation through environmental innovation.
In 2008 he was named by the Guardian Newspaper as one of 50 people that could ‘save the planet’.
In 2011 he was awarded the CBE in the New Year’s Honours List for services to Civil Engineering and the Environment.
He was awarded the CEMEX global lifetime achievement award in 2016
In 2011 he founded The Ecological Sequestration Trust and in 2016 the operating company Resilience Brokers.
He led the creation of the integrated systems planning platform resilience.io to support planning and investment decision making in city regions which was prototyped and demonstrated to support a masterplan for WASH in the greater ACCRA metropolitan area with a much lower investment through decentralised systems and better use of existing assets.
In 2020 he co-founded Pivot Projects.
He chairs Groundwork South Trustee Board and the SUNRISE Advisory Board, a project which supports zero energy building development in India, South Africa and Mexico.